


something other than stars

by AllTheMissingSocks



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Blood and Violence, Domestic Fluff, F/F, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, Multi, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-14
Updated: 2020-01-12
Packaged: 2021-02-24 18:40:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22222603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AllTheMissingSocks/pseuds/AllTheMissingSocks
Summary: And then Beau steps into the living room, takes in the scene, and sums up Jester’s whole life after the apocalypse with one phrase:“What the fuck.”Or: Honestly, Jester thought the hardest part of the zombie apocalypse would be fighting the zombies, not trying to navigate her role at the center of her relationship with her two best friends.
Relationships: Fjord & Beauregard Lionett, Fjord/Jester Lavorre, Fjord/Jester Lavorre/Beauregard Lionett, Jester Lavorre/Beauregard Lionett, Nott & Caleb Widogast, Yasha/Zuala (Critical Role)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 25





	something other than stars

**Author's Note:**

> No unrequited love here folks! Eventual healthy polyamorous relationship between Fjord, Jester, and Beau where Jester is dating both Fjord and Beau, and Beau and Fjord are bros and co-presidents of the Love and Respect Jester Lavorre Club. Rated for language and mentions of blood and violence.

It’s been three hours since they’ve started out on the more deserted roads, and Jester hopes they’ve finally made it far enough from the freeway that she won’t be able to hear the screams and groans when they bed down for the night. It was one of the first things survivors learned in the first few weeks: the interstates were no longer safe, not when staggering groups of the half-rotten infected found it to be the easiest way to travel from city to city in search of food.

Survivors. Jester had yelled at Fjord the first time he had called them that. They weren’t survivors, they were just three unlucky people who hadn’t been filled on the whole super-secret apocalypse bunker where everyone was waiting for them. They just had to find someone who could take them there, and then the big super-secret doors would open and there would be her Mama and everything would be just fine again.

Jester huffs a breath of air in the direction of the rapidly-sinking sun and tugs her pink jacket tighter around herself. In front of her, Beau walks a steady beat against the cracked pavement road, looking unperturbed by the turn in temperature. If she looked behind her, Jester knows she would find Fjord with his hands already jammed deep in his pockets to keep them warm. Stupid Beau and her stupid childhood in the mountains.

Fjord clears his throat and both Jester and Beau turn to him. When he talks, his voice is scratchy from not using it all day. They’re far enough from the highway that stealth and silence wasn’t really needed, but they had run out of meaningless things to chat about days ago and there’s only so many lewd songs Jester can make up before getting repetitive.

“I’m guessing there’s about an hour of daylight left, and from what those guys back at the last gas station said we have about two miles to go. Do we want to try and make it tonight or wait until tomorrow morning to look for the house?”

Beau leans against her walking stick as she considers the options. “I don’t want to miss the house and have to keep walking at night, like, at all. Especially since the highway is probably less than ten miles away,” and she sighs and drags a hand across her eyes. “But I also feel like shit and just really want to have a bed to stay in tonight.” Fjord nods, taking Beau’s words into consideration before turning to her. “Jester?”

She thinks for a second, taking the time to fiddle with a string that’s coming loose on her sleeve hem. “Hmm, I do not want to think we were fucked over about the house, especially since we traded all our Snickers bars for information about it.” Jester wraps the string around her pinky and suddenly feels so, so tired of everything. “I want to be able to lock a door behind me and sleep all night and not worry about surviving the night.”

There’s that word again, surviving. It used to be okay, the idea of living one day at a time, as long as Beau and Fjord were by her side when she went to bed and then again when she woke up. Now Jester is done with just surviving.

Something in Fjord’s expression shifts to just shy of sadness, and his voice is softer when he responds. “Yeah, I think we’ll keep moving.”

Beau looks at him with some inscrutable emotion in her eyes, and they have one of their weird eye contact conversations that Jester can never seem to figure out what language they’re talking in or what they’re saying. She takes another deep breath of the cold, fresh air and tries to shake herself out of the weird funk she had been stuck in all day. They start walking again, shoulder to shoulder, with Jester sandwiched in the middle.

“But hey you guys! What do you think the house will be like? The man who talked to us said there was a fireplace, and a basement so full of food he filled his packed and there was more than half still left.”

“I hope he was right, Jessie,” Beau says, and weaves a little to her left to bump their shoulders together. “I’m really getting sick of Fjord trying to get us to eat bugs because he used to eat them as a kid.”

“I was in boy scouts! They told us it was completely fine to eat crickets and shit like that.” Fjord has his hands jammed back into his pockets, but his tone is warm, lighter than it’s been in days, and their banter wraps around Jester like a cozy blanket.

Beau scoffs and scoops up a pebble to flick at Fjord. “Says the idiot that ate bugs.” The pebble shoots with blinding speed and strikes true against Fjord’s temple. He yelps and reaches up to rub the spot, while Beau calls him a baby and threatens him with another stone. Jester smiles, and feels safer than she has in a long time.

It takes them another hour to find the house, but with Fjord and Beau spending most of it trading dumb insults and weak punches, it feels like no time at all. They’re rounding a corner of cracked asphalt road and then suddenly it right in front of them, nestled in between two huge trees, the remaining intact windows dusty but still gleaming with the last pink rays of light. The yard is huge and overgrown, a tangled meadow reaching a hundred meters out to the right and left before the treeline starts.

The house itself is two stories tall, with a sagging yellow porch wrapping around the whole front. An overturned wheelbarrow and smashed flower pots litter the cracked cement walkway up to the house. Siding is missing in patches, and the pieces that remain are a god-awful, pea-soup green.

It’s the ugliest fucking house Jester’s seen in her life, but the sight of it makes her throat tight and tears spring to her eyes.

Next to her, Beau whoops in excitement and breaks into a sprint to reach the front door. Jester is climbing the stairs up the porch right behind her, and the sob she lets out when Beau tries the doorknob and finds it’s locking mechanism is still intact is damn near embarrassing. She feels the porch creak and dip when Fjord steps up onto it, and nearly sobs again when his warm hand rests on her shoulder.

“I’ll be damned,” he says quietly, reverently. In a flash, Jester spins on her heel and throws her arms around his neck, yanking him down to hug him. She feels his breath stutter and catch in his chest, and a few tears leak from the corner of her eyes when she squeezes them shut and smooshes her face against Fjord’s collarbone.

After a few seconds, Jester releases him from the embrace so she can turn and hug Beau as well. She’s already crouched by the doorknob with her lock-picking kit, but Jester knows the lock can wait for another couple of seconds, so she drops to her knees and her wraps her arms around Beau’s lithe shoulders. Beau grumbles for a moment before giving in to Jester’s hug, which, really, just proves that Jester’s hugs are amazing and totally magical.

Eventually, Beau pries open the lock on the door, and Fjord gently shoulders past them so that he can do his whole “just protecting you” shtick. Tonight, Jester’s fine with it because she doubts there’s anything more dangerous than a cockroach in a house that still has its front door locked.

They do a quick pass of all the floors just to make sure that there’s no other person in the house, and then Jester finally gets free reign of the house.

She throws open all the cabinets in the (ugly) yellow kitchen, hip-checks through the two bedroom doors to see the rooms beyond them, and laughs when Fjord sneezes as she plops down into every one of the dusty loveseat cushions in the tiny living room. He had found some termite-eaten wood logs somewhere and is attempting to light them in the red-brick fireplace.

“Y’know,” Fjord huffs, and some of the dust that had found its way into his hair floats down as he strikes another match, “I will admit that I didn’t really believe a word they said about this house. I mean, why leave it if it’s here?”

Dragging her fingers against the flower-patterned fabric of the sofa, Jester considers that. It was maybe a little odd, but they haven’t found anything yet that seems dangerous or poisonous in the house. An idea from old stories her mama used to tell about the creaking doors in the Chateau pops into her brain and she gasps.

“What if it’s ghost, Fjord! Oh my god, we could just be walking through a whole ghost family right now!”

Fjord just sighs, but she can see the way his eyes dart around the shadowed corners of the room for an instant. Jester feels a grin start to tug at her lips. This is just too easy.

“I’m totally right about this. I’m an expert in all things spooky houses,” and she drops her pink haversack so she can gesture to the room at large. “This place? So full of ghost energy I can’t believe I didn’t feel it the second I walked in.”

She hears a sudden thud from upstairs that she knows absolutely came from Beau’s investigation of the house, but jumps up and points at the ceiling with wide eyes. Fjord drops his burnt match and slowly rises to his feet with eyes locked on the ceiling.

“C’mon, there’s no way that ghosts are real. There has to have been some other reason that they left,” he says, but he still tries to subtly shift his hand to the heavy flashlight at his side before creeping towards where the stairs to the second floor begin.

There’s a couple more thumps and the sound of something heavy dragging across the floor before the sound of Beau swearing echoes from the stairway. Fjord huffs out a deep breath and shoots a dirty look at the way Jester’s now grinning; he shoulder-checks as he stomps back towards the fireplace.

Jester smiles harder and tosses him a last comment before skipping up the stairs to see if Beau needs any help. “Maybe there’s some ghost-cats here too!”

\-----

Autumn marches continually closer as they take the next couple of days sprucing up the house. After finding a half-dozen different types of axes and saws in a dilapidated shed, Fjord starts taking daily trips deeper and deeper into the nearby woods to turn felled trees into firewood. Beau spends a day dismantling the boards of the second twin bedframe and repurposing them as palates to nail over the number of broken windows.

Jester and Beau also take time to identify and reorganize the almost ridiculous amount of canned and dried food in the basement. Beau carefully writes down the amount and expiration date of everything, and Jester carefully sketches out and uses some of her precious supply of paint to color dicks on the bottoms of some cans.

All three of them had found it hard to sleep in separate rooms when they first slept in the house, and when Jester opened her door one door to see Beau sleeping propped against her doorframe, she put a stop to that shit real quick. While Beau and Fjord were outside the house shaking out the dust on the living room rugs, she shoved the one queen bed and the other twin bed together in the master bedroom.

A week into this new arrangement, Jester finds herself lying awake in the silent, pitchblack dark of their room. She’s on her left side in the middle of the queen, and Beau has wedged herself into the slight gap in between the two beds. Beau’s mouth is open in a silent snore and her arm is thrown over her eyes. Fjord sleeps on his side next to her on the twin, facing away from them, and Jester counts the steady rhythms of their breaths.

After a while of trying to get back to sleep, Jester huffs and resigns herself to a night of wandering the house. She shuffles slowly out of bed and throws the blankets she had stolen during the night back over the pair still sleeping.

She makes her way slowly downstairs, careful to step over the step third from the bottom that always creaks something awful. The fire in the living room has since gone out, but the line of flannel long-sleeves Jester had hung up to dry in the evening are still warm when she shrugs into one. She gathers the rest into a bundle and hugs the warm fabric close as she folds herself into the corner of the loveseat that faces the living room window.

Jester hasn’t concerned herself with keeping track of the passage of time as much as either Beau or Fjord, but the chill of the wind and the way her her bare feet are freezing means it’s probably closer to October than she thought it was.

She can make out the edge of the treeline, where the slightest sliver of pink light announces the approaching dawn. The woods are still too unfamiliar to them for even Beau to try risking staying overnight in them yet, but she knows they’ll have to start moving farther and farther into them to find more resources. There’s no shortage of canned soups and vegetables in the basement, but Jester knows that the number of water jugs they have is starting to dwindle into single digits, and the small pond nearby is only really good to wash clothes and blankets in. Jester’s also been experimenting with making some type of rope snare that they could use to catch rabbits or pheasants to preserve for the winter.

The pile of shirts in her arms have lost their remaining warmth, and Jester is still feeling restless, so she places them down and goes to stand by the window instead. She puffs warm breaths onto the cold glass and then draws little unicorns and candies in the resulting condensation until her pointer finger is numb with cold. It’s a little childish, but Jester feels like doing something for the sake of familiarity in a world where everything is so unfamiliar.

Well, she corrects herself, some things are starting to feel familiar. Little things, like Beau’s gruff greetings in the morning before she gets into the instant coffee, or the sound of Fjord stacking wood in the mud room. The way sometimes they’ll all sit up together by the fire during the nights they can’t sleep and Beau will tease Fjord about the yarn he carefully weaves together with the knitting needles he found, and the way the Fjord will snipe back about her new fascination with reading the dog-eared survival guides that were left by the previous owners.

Jester snaps back to herself as she hears the shuffling sounds and creaking of the floor that means that Fjord’s probably up and getting ready. She traces out one more little doodle: a smiley face with googly eyes and triangle-shaped teeth pointed up.

As she’s finishing the right eye, something from beyond the glass of the window catches her attention. It flashes again, and for a second Jester thinks it must just be the rising sun reflecting off a patch of frost or a puddle. Then, she squints and really looks at the bobbing and rhythmic flashing of the light.

Something in her stomach drops and her fingers freeze against the window. It’s obviously no mere reflection of the sun; someone, or something, is outside with a lantern.

She’s too scared to yell for Beau and Fjord and risk alerting the trespasser, so after a second she finally tears herself away from the window. She races to the closet by the front door that houses her shot-gun and snatches it and a box of shells up as fast as she can. Jester’s up the stairs in a flash, not even bothering to knock on the bedroom before bursting through it.

Fjord looks at her in surprise, halfway through putting on a long-sleeve. “What’s up?” he asks, eyes darting to the gun in her hands. Beau grunts something at them from the bed and slaps her hand over her eyes. Jester glances towards her but decides it’ll be too much trouble to try and get her up.

“There’s someone outside!” Jester hisses and catches Fjord’s sleeve in her hand; with one tug she drags him through the door. He looks confused as he stumbles to keep up with her pace, but he’s dropped his voice to a whisper when he replies.

“What do you mean? Can you see who it is?”

Jester leads him to the window but directs him to kneel down so that whoever it is can’t see them through the glass, then takes the time to load her gun and tuck the extra shells into her flannel’s pocket. Fjord peeks around carefully, and he must see the light because his face goes from confused to stone-cold.

“Can you hear them talking to each other?” He asks, tone clipped. Jester shakes her head no and takes another look over the edge of the windowsill. The light has come closer, within a hundred yards of the right side of the house, and Jester can now make out the silhouette of two people.

The sudden sound of the floor creaking under their weight makes them both jump. Jester’s heart is slamming against her ribcage in a way she hasn’t felt since they last encountered a mob of the undead. She takes a deep breath of chilly morning air to try and calm it’s racing beat, then pushes herself resolutely to her feet.

“You do your whole negotiator thing, and I’ll be here with my big ‘fuck off’ gun to back you up,” she explains, and hefts the double-barrel shotgun to emphasize the ‘fuck off’ aspects of it. Fjord meets her eyes and nods his head, “Alright, are we going into this with the intent to scare them off?”

Jester worries her lip for a second and thinks. She doesn’t want to hurt them if it’s just a misunderstanding of property, but she also doesn’t want anyone to hurt her or her friends. “Yeah, we’ll just tell them to get out of here,” she decides.

Fjord grabs a flashlight from the closet while they pass it and silently eases the door open with a gentle hand. There’s no way they can try and be sneaky when crossing the old porch, so Fjord and his flashlight lead while Jester and her gun follow.

As soon as they turn the corner to the right side of the house Fjord trains the beam of the flashlight onto the two intruders and Jester takes that as her cue to raise the shotgun towards them.

“Stop right there!” He calls to them, and the figures freeze. In the light, Jester can see that the pair is made up of a woman on the shorter side with brown braids and a tall man in a grungy coat. In fact, everything about them is pretty grungy and dirty-looking, but Jester isn’t about to be the person that judges someone on their looks during the apocalypse.

The girl holding the lantern stops in her tracks and the man next to her stumbles forward from the sudden jerk. Her tanned arm reaches out to steady him, and Jester’s tight grip on her gun loosens. He really doesn’t look good.

Fjord must be able to see the ragged states their in as well because his voice is softer when he speaks again. “We aren’t going to shoot you or anything, just suspicious of trespassers. Do you have any weapons on you?”

The woman with braids looks towards her companion, but he doesn’t respond. In fact, Jester’s not even sure he’s conscious. She can see the other girl gulp before she stutters out, “No! No weapons. We didn’t mean to startle you, I’m just really worried about my partner and didn’t notice any signs that anyone was here.”

Her eyes dart back in between Jester and Fjord. Some little line of wisdom her mama told her once flashes through Jester’s mind, something about kindness and olive branches.

“No tricks?” she says suspiciously and looks for any shiftiness in the woman’s eyes. She squeaks and raises her hands in defense. “No tricks! I swear,” and she sounds very sincere to Jester.

Jester clicks the safety on and slips the gun over her back in one smooth motion. “Alright,” she says and jumps down from the porch onto the frosted grass. Behind her, Fjord protests and scrambles to follow her.

She makes her way over to the other side of man and smiles at the now very startled-looking woman. “I’m Jester! I’m a veterinary nurse, and while your friend isn’t a dog, that makes me almost qualified to help him.” Jester loops her arm around the man’s waist and is a little surprised when the guy shifts to stand a little taller and take some weight off his left side. Not unconscious then.

They start making a slow, weaving path to the front door and Fjord makes his way over to them and holds his hand out to to carry the woman’s lantern. “I’m Fjord,” he offers, “and sorry, Jester can be sort of… overwhelming.” The woman, who Jester can now see to be much younger than she originally thought, maybe early twenties at most, nods in acceptance.

“That’s alright. I’m Nott, and this,” she tilts her head towards the man’s dirt-smeared face, “is Caleb. A couple days ago we were moving along the highway and a mob caught up to us during the night. Caleb got hurt so we went into the woods.”

Still holding Caleb between them, Jester and the woman cross over the doorjamb and stumble to the couch. Nott starts explaining their journey again as they settle Caleb onto the cushions and Jester investigates the bloody gash on his left leg.

“We tried to keep following the highway from the treeline, but then Caleb got a fever, and I’m not really good at navigating or anything so we just… got lost. I didn’t know anything else to do, so when I saw the house I thought I could just sneak in and be gone by the morning.”

Her eyes widen at the admission at the end. “Not that I was going to steal anything! You understand, though,” and she starts wringing her hands together, “I just needed some new bandages and water, and I just thought that there might be some old curtains…” She trails off at the end and twists her hands into her dirty yellow dress, not looking her or Fjord in the eye.

Jester shares a concerned look with him as he crosses back and forth across the kitchen to gather clean mugs, a bowl, and one of their water jugs. They’re obviously an odd pair, but they don’t seem like they intend any harm.

“We aren’t assuming anything like that,” Jester soothes as she turns back to untying Caleb’s boots. “What did you say your name was again? Not? Not what?”

She looks at Jester and finally stops wringing her hands, instead starts carefully maneuvering Caleb’s arms so she can tug the drawstring bag he’s wearing off. “Oh! It’s N-o-t-t. Nott.”

Jester thanks Fjord as she takes the mugs of water he offers as he makes his way towards the fireplace. “That one definitely takes the cake for the most confusing name I’ve ever heard,” she grouses as she offers Nott one. Nott shrugs and downs half the thing is one go.

“That’s exactly what you told me when I told you my name had the letter J in it,” Fjord adds as he restarts and builds up the fire in the fireplace. Jester flips him off.

Her and Nott work to gently remove Caleb’s pant leg that’s stuck to the wound with enough congealed blood for Jester to assume that the wound reopened several times before finally clotting over.

Jester hadn’t really lied when she said she was a veterinary nurse. She only had one more semester of clinical work before she was supposed to graduate, but it was just one more thing that had disintegrated when the apocalypse started.

Jester banishes the thoughts when Fjord hands her a bowl of clean water that he had warmed over the fire and a stack of clean towels. The cut itself isn’t bad, fairly shallow and short, but the poor conditions they were in meant that it hadn’t been properly cleaned and it’s now inflamed and angry-looking; even the surrounding skin is streaked with the red signs of infection.

Caleb groans in pain when Jester starts cleaning the wound, but Nott soon leaps up to drag short nails through his hair to comfort him. With the sounds of Fjord futzing around the kitchen in the background, Jester finishes cleaning and dressing the wound by the time the sun starts peeking over the horizon.

Jester tosses Nott a thick cotton shirt and an old pair of leggings that will work for her shorter but thicker frame. Fjord gives her another bowl of clean warm water and washrags before pointing her towards the bathroom with a mirror that’s on the first floor. Jester checks on Caleb one more time, but he seems to be sleeping the sleep of the exhausted rather than the sick.

“So now what?” The way Fjord asks is nonchalant as he presses a cup of coffee that’s likely oversaturated with sugar into Jester’s grabbing hands, but Jester can hear the tension in his voice. She settles back against the linoleum counter and prepares for a more serious conversation.

He’s never been the most trusting; hell, when they first met Beau it took Fjord a week to sleep within fifteen feet of her. Jester can’t really understand it from his point of view since she’s always trusted easily, but the bitter coffee tastes more like ashes in her mouth as she considers his question. She’s been forcing him to put aside his glaringly obvious trust issues because of her rash decisions for a long time now.

“I want to let them stay until Caleb is healthy, at least. I’m sorry I gave them our food and water so fast. I just, I don’t know. Felt bad for them, I guess,” she confesses as she fiddles with the spoon in her mug.

Fjord sets his empty coffee cup on the counter and looks at her with something like understanding in his hazel eyes. “Jessie, you don’t have to be sorry. I don’t mind much about the stuff. It’s just things, and it would be selfish not to share when we have so much.”

He tugs a hand through the snarls in his hair, and his next words don’t come as easily, “I...just worry more, I think. Before I met you, I just worried about myself, and then there was you and then Beau to worry about too. And I know I don’t need to protect you two,” he adds quickly, “but I just can’t help myself. I worry, and I don’t trust, and that’s why I’m really glad you invited Nott and Caleb in.”

Jester looks at him in surprise at the last words. Fjord grins a little at her. “It’s what I like about you. Me and Beau are kind of just assholes who don’t trust anyone, but you’re willing to give to give everyone a chance. It’s amazing, really.”

Jester can feel a blush start burning on her cheeks, which, ridiculous. Jester Lavorre doesn’t blush.

“Pfft, me? Not an asshole? I assume you haven’t found all my drawings on the canned corn yet.” She wags her eyebrows salaciously at him and now it’s Fjord’s turn to blush. He must have found some of them since he turns pink all the way from his cheeks to the tips of his ears, and Jester is full-on grinning now.

It’s one of the most surreal moments in her life yet. There’s golden morning light streaming in through the moth-eaten kitchen curtains, an unconscious man who was attacked by undead passed out on her couch, and someone drinking coffee and talking about their trust issues with her in the kitchen of an abandoned house that she lives in now.

And then Beau steps into the living room, takes in the scene, and sums up Jester’s whole life after the apocalypse with one phrase:

“What the fuck.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed! English is my main day-to-day language but not my first language, so let me know if I slaughtered any poor grammar rules. Next chapter: the rest of the Nein arrive at Casa Fjorestergard, Jester becomes Bear Grylls, and Yasha really loves her badass wife.
> 
> -Niamh


End file.
